online:23 October 2008 modified: 23, 24, 30 October 2008 23 October 2008 a field of crows and other astonishments
in a city park and elsewhere
...i was about to return... but decided to continue sitting here as 20 to 30 crows descended on this their habitual feeding ground ... short grass surrounded by trees...
...in twos or threes they are assiduously pecking at the grass for something eatable that only they can see and extract from this almost bare patch of ground... one of the older ones comes close enough for me to see that it is finding and eating what look like small seeds fallen from the trees... how is it that animals (and also prehistoric people?) are content and healthy on a diet close to what we would recognise as dirty and unpleasant objects on the ground (for instance crab apples in all their bitterness) while we the self-styled civilised ones demand and get semi-artificial food that is heated and transformed into what we call delicious meals, but is quite often unhealthy?...
...suddenly all the crows fly squawking and croaking to the treetops - i didn't see what frightened them...
...and now my thoughts turn to the cooked meal that i expect to eat in an hour or so... time to return!
...and as i walked away from this dietary performence by birds i began to notice gravity, one of the the forces we seldom feel directly though it holds us to the ground of this rotating sphere and holds everything together...
...and now, on a bridge over a motorway, i see that the usually frightening speed of the many trucks and cars is reduced to a crawl... at which i begin to notice the commercial names very visibly inscribed on the larger vehicles: Gloover International, Box B.V., Verheyden, Epple, Gals... and now the bridge shakes as two buses pass just behind me, i guess it oscillates only a few millimeters but it feels like an artificial earth tremor which i suppose it is... and suddenly the traffic stops all together for a few minutes and i see that there is a strange object beside one of the traffic lanes.. it looks to me like a corpse or carcass, could it be meat fallen off a truck?... but no one is free to pay any attention to it... the drivers are all tied to their vehicles, it's almost criminal to stop, let alone to get out and walk on the high-speed road surface...
...and then i walk on over a second bridge beneath which is a normally empty railway line but today two trains pass within a minute without any sense of traffic congeston... more a sense of regulated safety and spaciousness and at a higher speed than on the road surface...
...all these things can be seen as oddities of industrial living... or they can be seen as signals that something is profoundly wrong (as well as right?) in the culture as a whole, and in our thoughts... the controlling medium of life that we make and suffer or enjoy, the semi-mystery of life as lived by mortals, us...
...later this evening i received an email from {brad brace} 'the unknown artist' as he sometimes calls himself... and on whose website came an extraordinary paragraph called INGREDIENTS, quite calming, a kind of utopia of emptiness, in which both destructive humanity and raw nature are superceded to permit the making of a perfect world... the rest of his website also astonishes me, and inspires:
http://bbrace.laughingsquid.net/bbrace1.html
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